Somebody came up with an analog video disk system in the late 40s/early 50s, but surprisingly it went nowhere.

John Logie Baird, the Scottish inventor of a 25 line mechanical television system, made 78 RPM recordings of his video signal in the 1920s. But, due to difficulties in syncronizing the signal on the disk to the mechanical TV system, he was never able to play them back. An engineer recently obtained some of these audio tracks, and was able to process the audio into video, doing a huge amount of time base correction. Astonishing to see video from 1928. I wish I could find the link, but the link I had seen is now dead. [aol.com]

Asper is an adjective meaning rough, thus aspera means "rough things." I believe that the word aspire would be related to spirare, to breath. My literal translation would be "To the stars, through rough things"

. He would have a better chance of being say a computer programmer than a religious leader

Yeah. Luckily, it's already been done. You see, Richard Stallman is the new messiah. This may seem like a strange time to break the truth, but it's got to come out some time I suppose. The proof? Just look at the similarity in beard tastes...

VinylVideo has to be one of the stupidest things I have ever seen. Interesting at first, but when you realise they want you to spend $2,000 on the player and up to $12,000 (!!!!) on the picture disks. Whatever guys, This thing can probably be made for $99 with spare parts, and I'm not even going to comment on the picture disks (12,000 dollars for a fucking ALBUM? COME ON!!) This thing could have been a fun campy thing to show your friends, until these guys got fucking greedy.

Interesting family outing. A bunch of people in civilian clothing having the time of their life, riding and crushing hard drives in an M-109 155mm self-propelled howitzer.

I know the Swiss army is largely composed of reservists, but what I don't get is how you can get to drive an SPH out of the base, get civilians on it, and play funky games with it. If you're a Swiss reservist, can you keep a tank or SPH in your garage? How does it work? Don't you get reprimanded for allowing civilians near or in a military vehicle?

I believe this chemical is used in most shampoo's. I often read whatever I can whenever I can, and since there isn't much reading material in the shower, I have read the ingredients upon several occations. This chemical sounds aufully familiar (and sodium laureth sulfate). (BTW, I am also a chemist, so it's not _too_ wierd that I remember that sort of thing).

IIRC, the luxury tax was between boarwalk and park place, so the ISP fee replaces the luxury tax. I think that the Linux and Sun squares are the utilities, but my memory of the monopoly board is far from flawless so I could be wrong.

This product seems like a dream - for MEN WHO CAN'T EVEN BE BOTHERED TO PUT 1/100th OF AN INCH OF LATEX ON THEIR COCK! Having experienced both "clad" and "unclad" intercourse (disclosure: I'm male), I can honestly say there's not enough of a sensation difference to matter, when the alternative is exposure to god-knows-what, or unwanted pregnancy. That said, I don't think this product is worthless - I see it working best WITH a condom, as a backup method (and an alternative to smelly, foul-tasting foam or jelly!).

Anne Marie's idea about this having an effect as the worldwide AIDS situation has merit. It allows women some control, when the men simply WON'T wear a condom. But it's not perfect. In parts of Africa, men (claim to) prefer sex with a woman whose vagina is very dry. Women go so far as to actually *wipe* dry (ouch) their vaginas before sex to avoid displeasing their husbands. I don't see this slippery solution working very well for them.

AAARGH!! I can't believe the pure cruelty of it all! This makes me feel the same as I do when I hear that someone just threw a bag of kittens into the river. Ok, maybe not that bad. But it's down the same path... They're going to pay for this sin some day... bastards

Please donate all of your extra IBM relay-key keyboards to me, I'll gladly send you plenty of crappy Microsoft keyboards in exchange, which you can abuse all you like.

Salon had a story [salonmag.com] on this a few months ago. They say that "Piret's research team has secured a North American patent on a secret formulation of sodium lauryl sulfate, in which it exists as a liquid at room temperature, but when applied to the body (i.e., the genitals) changes to a gel." There are a couple of things wrong with this.

First, there is no such animal as a "North American Patent" there are Canadian patents, and there are U.S. patents, but there are no "North American patents."

Second, you can not get a patent for "a secret formulation", since in order to obtain the patent, the formulation must be disclosed.

So, the above data is obviously wrong. Hope you didn't get all riled up.

I do expect that there is a patent application pending for this. However, that is not necessarily a problem, if the patent is licensed, either for a nominal fee or free. So, don't get annoyed before you have all the facts.

you know what really rocks? The IBM M2. Lightweight without all the crap around the M1, yet with the firm click. Came with Canadian PS/1's (2123's) Unless you need the weight of the bulletproof steel armor to hurt someone with the M1.
Calum

The view of sex as an act without consequences and as some kind of right is modern. Don't try to project it on others. It's abhorent to all but careless young men and misogynists.

My girlfriend would be rather upset to hear you say that... It's not only men who like sex. Ever hear that a woman's sex drive peaks around 30? There's a fair amount of evidence to suggest that that's mainly due to the fact that it takes women that long to fully get over having been socially conditioned to believe that girls who like sex are morally inferior. If one takes proper precautions, the risk of sex is no greater than any of a number of other activities we take for granted (such as driving). Trying to project morals from eras before effective safe sex onto the modern world is sickening, and demeaning to women.

Hmm, compare my sexual history with someone who won't post as anything but an AC? No thanks.

Even if your's was true(big if there) then you would certainly see the benefit of this product to non-hookers. I bet a lot of your "women" wonder if they got something from you.(and a fair number of them probably did)

Well, with (much) older CRTs this might be the case, however modern ones are designed to fail in a relatively safe manner. I know, because I was once opening up a monitor to try to extract the flyback transformer (for HV experiments). I snapped the tube right at the stem in from of the electron gun. All I heard was a fairly innocuous 'pop' sound. Hardly any glass left the case, and the front of the tube was almost intact. Just don't much on the lead coatings.

Of course you should wear eye protection when you do such things. Heck, they say you should wear a mask when cutting wood these days! (Something about resin particulates).

Yes, but in that sense, from one slice, you would only be able to jump to two other slices, e.g. the left and right ones in this example. But as you can jump to the other two adjacent slices, it becomes "4-D"--

I am starting to believe that we have the ability to see into the fourth dimension, but that we just don't know how to look for it.

I live up on a big hill, and each morning I usually go speeding down on my bicycle. There is one house down the hill with a particularly well-hidden driveway, out of which a car occasionally comes backing out. A couple of months ago I was racing down when the car starting backing out. There was no chance of stopping in time, so I had to crash into a nearby tree to avoid hitting the car. The usual pain and obscenities insued.

Now, a rational person would take this as a sign that he should bike more slowly and cautiously down this hill. Fortunately, I am blind to common sense. But a strange thing has happened. Twice since then, as I started biking down the hill, I had the "feeling" that the car was about to come backing out. Both times I slowed down. And both times my instinct was correct, as the car came backing out as my feeling indicated it would.

I could not see or hear the car (my bike is kind of noisy since hitting the tree), and even if I could I would have no way of knowing that the car was actually going to back up (as opposed to just idle there for a while) Is it possible from my previous accident that I've learned how to see where this car is going to be X seconds ahead of time?

The daily bike journey is the only time I ever really get this feeling, so I suppose I will continue the experiment until I either hit the car (or tree while avoiding it), or correctly predict its appearance enough times to convince me that it's not just a coincidence. But regardless, I'm not willing to rule out our capacity to see into a future (not "the future", since there are probably an infinite number of those...)

Actually, you can find them for less than that. PCKeyboard.com [yahoo.com] (actually a yahoo store) has 'em for $50.

Not that you would ever need to buy one if you already have one. Mine has been through more trauma than I care to recall. I got pissed once and threw it through a plate glass window into a lake, and it was working fine half an hour later.

I once heard that the best way to measure the suitability of a keyboard is to take a look at it's destructitve potential when thrown. If it can inflict a life-threatening injury, you've found a good keyboard. If it merely scratches or bruises, then keep looking.

I wonder if this is why they have started making them lighter and "safer" nowadays; perhaps the designers are taking workplace violence into consideration in their designs.

Copperhead shells require a Ground/Vehicular Laser Locator/Designator (G/VLLD) for final approach. The shell is programmed with the laser code for that particular G/VLLD before firing, and locks onto that pattern on final approach. Generally, the party calling for fire paints for the final 10 seconds of the shell trajectory.

Is that really in 4 dimensions? Or just one way to make a 3d maze on a flat screen? I don't see where the 4th dim comes in. You can move L and R, and back and forth to adjacent squares. It just seems like a 3d maze and you view slices of it that you can move between.

But then again I could be missing something here. Wouldn't be the first time, I was wrong once before but it turned out I was mistaken.
:)
Jason

Is that really in 4 dimensions? Or just one way to make a 3d maze on a flat screen? I don't see where the 4th dim comes in. You can move L and R, and back and forth to adjacent squares. It just seems like a 3d maze and you view slices of it that you can move between.

The 4th dimension comes in because you can move to any white space in any of the adjacent squares, not just 2 of them (up and down). Imagine moving in your own square as 2 dimensions (left and right), the squares above or below your big sqare as the third dimension (up and down), and the squares to the left and right of your big square as your forth dimension (left and right, but on a different "level").

Studdies of spermicidal lubricant have shown that it actually increases the transmision of AIDS by irritating the woman's sensitive skin. If it kills germs, it's an irritant. If you can scrub a toilet with it, you should not put it on your genitals.

I can honestly say there's not enough of a sensation difference to matter

And I, also being male, also having experienced with and without condoms, can honestly say that there is enough of a sensation difference to matter. Sure, if it's a condom or nothing, I choose the condom, but anything that makes the condom unnecessary is great in my book. I won't even use latex condoms, I buy the polyurethane (if that's how you spell it) ones, because they're thinner. People have different tastes, just because you don't feel a difference doesn't mean others won't.

A lot of people have been commenting about the fourth dimension being time. I think it is worth clearing this up.

First, dimensions don't have a specific ordering. Time is, according to relativity, one dimension, and space gives us three more. You are welcome to mix them up, that's the Lorentz transform (stationary -> moving frame).

Time is a little different from space, though. Spacetime is hyperbolic, not Euclidean, since time has a different metric sig (or if you prefer, is represented by imaginary rather than real coordinates). Also, if we believe in causality it is one way.

When people say n-D, they are usually referring to a Euclidean space, so spacetime doesn't work. Of course you are welcome to pick any n dimensions you want. In the maze the dimensions are quantized, so the four dimensions are easy to choose - the coordinates of the board and on the board!

Well, obviously. It's hosted by America On-Line, which is America's most popular and therefore best on-line service.

The funny part is that Tom still kept it up, despite the fact that he [cmu.edu] is now privy to the world's largest Internet uplink [ncne.net] for civilian use, and is also a TA for 15-212 [principles...amming.org], which I'm currently taking.

This product seems like a dream - for MEN WHO CAN'T EVEN BE BOTHERED TO PUT 1/100th OF AN INCH OF LATEX ON THEIR COCK!

Your post seems like a dream - for WOMEN WHO CAN'T EVEN BE BOTHERED TO HAVE SOME DISCRETION ABOUT WHO THEY FUCK!

Seriously, it shouldn't be a problem as intercourse requires two people. If a man doesn't want to put on a condom, the woman can close her legs and say no. You can argue that he might force her anyways and rape her, but how would she get into this situation in the first place? People have sex too easily, and should try to be a little more picky about who they let in their pants. This goes for both men and women. It's not that difficult to wait longer than a week after meeting someone before having sex. It just takes a little bit of common sense, which most humans don't seem to have.

One thing that seperates humans from animals is the fact that we can restrain ourselves from acting on impulses. If you want to have sex with someone but don't have a lot of trust with that person, then you are an idiot if you act on it. Sex is more than just having an orgasm, because there can be very life changing consequences. Try to have a meaningful relationship rather than just busting a nut and you'll see what I'm talking about.

ya know Briggs n stratton motors were fine when I was a bit shorter and playing with the cheapo go-karts...
I look at this hovercraft thing and imeddatly the thought pops into mind... hmm wonder what happens when we put in a professional racing engine...
I do have that old motorcycle sitting out back... it had about 45 hp:P
might be able to lift me AND my backpack at that point!
Also would have to replacy that handle with something a bit more classy
oh and install a gps navigation system
and foglights:P

Which 4th dimention? The 4th dimention isn't necessarily time, we just tend to say time is the 4th dimention (for all we know, it could be the 100th). The map uses a 4th dimention which very well could be stationary relative to the other 3 (and we don't know that those other three are the first 3:)

You bastard! That is a IBM's legendary buckling spring M-type keyboard that the kid drilled on! Those keyboards deserve some respect, I tell ya, they are better than any of CmdrTaco's lame keyboards combined.

There are a lot of fans for these keyboards who will happily adopt it from you, please don't destroy them. A new one is 80+ dollars.

NannyMUD [lysator.liu.se] used to have a six-dimensional maze in a Discworld-themed area done by Profezzorn [lysator.liu.se]. The maze was set in a 2x2x2x2x2x2 "cube" where the possible directions of travel were north/south, east/west, up/down, meta-north/meta-south, meta-east/meta-west, and meta-up/meta-down. The "goal" of the maze was to locate the one room out of the 64 that was not accessible and then use a one-shot device for destroying the wall. Conceptually, the way I envisioned the maze was as 8 separate 2x2x2 cubes. Each time I moved in a meta direction, it was as if I teleported to a different cube, while retaining my same spatial coordinate. I also named each cube using an ordered triple of its meta-coordinate. So the initial cube was (0,0,0). If I went 'meta-up', I was in the cube identified as (0,0,1), and so forth.

Those RCA VideoDisks lost to LaserDiscs just like Beta lost to VHS: the LaserDiscs are imperious to wear, and handled special formatting in regular play mode like exact still-frame and slow motion play (backwards AND forwards! it's pretty cool)

Note: I have a bunch of Lasers, and there's nothing like freaking out a bunch of people when they come over and see a pristine copy of Bladerunner playing backwards at 1/8 speed:)

I thought 4D was 'time', too. Until I read this intro [reading.ac.uk] to the 4th D. Here's a picture [reading.ac.uk] of a 4D cube(hypercube).

Later, while looking at the puzzle, I noticed and gave thought to the fact that you can move upwards to two different places, and still be going up. That, I think, is the more obvious basis for that being a 4D cube, layed out in 2D.

Here's an excerpt from the intro:

An introduction to the fourth dimension

Man has been fascinated about the possibility of there being more than three dimensions ever since he has understood the concept. Henry More (1614-1687) considered that spirits have four dimensions. H.G. Wells suggested that the fourth
dimension is time in The Time Machine. This can be misleading in fact since time is somewhat different from the other three dimensions as we know them. Abbott's Flatland (1) is probably nearer the mark. He considers the life of a 2-dimensional square which suddenly has the chance to travel in three dimensions. This gives the square the ability to see inside objects in its
2-dimensional world, something it previously thought was impossible. Using this analogy from three to four dimensions, we would be able to see inside solid objects if we were able to break out of our own 3-dimensional world into the fourth
dimension. Taking the analogy further, when a 3-dimensional object crosses a 2-dimensional world its inhabitants simply see an object appear from nowhere, grow in size, changing its shape in a rather odd manner if the object is irregular, and then decrease in size until it disappears again. In our world this would be the equivalent of an object suddenly appearing somewhere, growing
in size, shrinking and then disappearing without trace. This may soung very disturbing but this is because we do not fully understand the fourth dimension.

That's a maze with 4 degrees of freedom, not a 4d maze. Remember the big thing about descent- it offered 6 degrees of freedom, but it wasn't a 6d game.... No I'm afraid this is simply a 3d maze.

No I'm afraid you're getting confused. Don't get degrees of freedom mixed up with dimensions. DFs include rotational and translation type movements. The 6 DFs in Decent are 3 axis of translational movement and 3 axis of rotation. In this case you have 4 axis of translational movement (left/right, up/down within a block, left/right, up/down between blocks). That requires 4 dimensions.

Who are you to say who should be allowed to fuck whom, and on what schedule they should be able to do it?

What's the difference between you, sounding off on your opinions about sexuality, and some religious conservative demanding abstinence until marriage? Bully for you if you can stick to your code of ethics, but you have no business lecturing the rest of us.

It just takes a little bit of common sense, which most humans don't seem to have.

Bullshit. Human beings are built to fuck. It's part of who we are, it's part of being a living organism. Sexual diseases and unwanted pregnancies are unfortunate, sad, and inevitable; avoiding them takes knowledge, willpower, and a cultural context that is by no means universal. Do you have any idea how recent the idea that sex can kill you really is? How can another way to prevent disease be anything but a step forward?

I'm sorry but that is too much for the majority of us guys that are 15 - 30 or so. You are telling us to not give money to the people that brought us such greats as G.I. Joe and the Transformers. I have based my outlook on life on these two cartoons and sets of toys. I have started to become a mixture of Duke from G.I. Joe (the haircut at least), the overbearing presence of Optimus Prime, the sarcasm of Starscream, the patriotism of Serpentor, and the thriftiness of Destro.

You see, my brain was filled with these products at an early age, like most of the other guys here. We learned a lot from those 30 second clips at the end of every G.I. Joe cartoon where they told us, "knowing is half the battle."

For many of us, Hasbro is the company that raised us as our parents were working/abandoning us/etc so we grew up with what we learned from TV, comic books, and our toys. Hasbro was a major company that helped me become the person I am today.

The ingredients in Bergeron's gel are dirt cheap; sodium
lauryl sulfate is used in ordinary shampoo. Tests- including
one that Bergeron conducted on himself- show it to be
non-toxic and non-irritating.

doh! i'm john willemin, the guy that originally put the microsoft ad on his web server... oops, the submissino got accepted, and my web server kind of crumbled. it's got 32 megs of ram and a 233 mhz processor so this was kind of inevitable i spose =)

You bastard! That is a IBM's legendary buckling spring M-type keyboard that the kid drilled on! Those keyboards deserve some respect, I tell ya, they are better than any of CmdrTaco's lame keyboards combined.

Agreed. The only keyboard in the same league as those (and their compact PS/2 cousin) is the two-tone brown keyboard that shipped with early Compaq Deskpros. Actually, I like it for exactly the opposite reasons that I like the loud IBM spring-loaders.

Sometimes, you want to feel like you're using a Selectric to type your e-mail, sometimes you don't.

I wish the guy had destroyed a really cheesy no-name clone keyboard instead.

When I was about 10 years old I ordered a "How to make a hovercraft" manual from the back of an old Donald Duck mag. The magazine was published in about 1950, somehow the company still had some lying around. So I tried to make it.

Bassicly you stick a vacume cleaner moter on a circular peice of wood. and put some lining underneth the disc of wood to hold the air.

guess what. it didn't work. by the time I was done (even at the age of 10) I could till the vacume cleaner moter wasn't going to cut it. The design, i think, could have worked (well maybe not). but with a much more powerfull moter. besides who wants to hover around and be plugged into the wall?

i've got it down to an average of about 5 seconds--and I don't feel like I am working at this--is it just me or is the maze algorithm a bit too simple(not that I could do better--but I am not publishing it)--all you have to do is aim for the biggest white spot, then towards the top corner from there

BAH! Give my a (soon-to-be-)dead computer, and a high power rifle any day of the week! You should see what an Enfield.303, a.30-06, or better still a.458 Magnum does to a monitor. An AR-15 is fun too, but a little light for real satisfaction. Nothing like dumping 3500 foot-pounds of energy into something to take your frustrations out.

I've seen (and admittedly) participated in a couple threads here about pirating the Dune miniseries. I beg everyone NOT to do this.

It's stated on Sci-Fi's website that if there's enough interest, we stand a chance of seeing books 2-6 come to the small screen. I would LOVE to see this happen, and don't want to see anything out there that might jeapordize the rest of the serieses (serii?).

I'm a big fan of Lynch's film, mostly because I'm a Lynch fan and partly because I can tell myself that it was just "inspired" by Herbert, and not an adaptation thereof. If the SciFi channel's miniseries is as good as it looks, many Herbert fans (myself included) will be VERY happy, and VERY hungry for more.

South Park made Comedy Central... It's hard to argue this. Once SP started, they received some pitiful number of nielsen points -- but it was a LOT for cable networks. It gave them the room to charge more for advertising and fund other creative ventures. That's what SciFi is gambling on with Dune, I'd imagine.

I don't have cable, and Sci Fi isn't in the basic lineup where I am. So I've called TCI this week to get it installed. If/when SciFi offers this on video/dvd, I'll purchase it. Things like this are what they need. It may cost a bit for the effort, but think if it as an investment in the future -- for all of us geeks.:)

...is that after a while the Energizer bunny rabbit goes accross it. I bet a lot of people don't think about the rabbit anymore. What I'm wondering, is if they made arrangements to have some bunny appearances 100 years into the future. The company might not even be around any more. That would be trippy.

A discovery such as this sodium lauryl sulfate gel (an invisible HIV-fighting non-toxic topical gel) could rewrite the face of the current world-wide AIDS epidemic. But instead of sharing her finding with the world and saving millions of lives, Piret is choosing to patent her discovery and make a profit off the suffering of others.

I encourage all of you to write or call her at (418) 654-2705 and andre.desormeaux@crchul.ulaval.ca and tell her that there are more important things in this world than money. It's the moral thing to do.

Is that another one of those obscure japanese cartoons that.5% of people actually see in the states? Could someone explain to me what this is supposed to mean?

It's not Japanese. It's a talk show (with skits) that shows on Cartoon Network, using clips from a cheesy old Hanna-Barbera (Scooby Doo, The Flintstones) adventure cartoon from the 60s (IIRC) with new voices dubbed over. "Coast to Coast" was developed by Joel Hodgson, the genius who also created Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Space Ghost is the superhero who hosts the show, and Zorak is the evil alien bug who acts as the show's band leader.

Every dollar given to Hasbro is a dollar that goes towards illegally taking away [slashdot.org] people's domains. They'll only stop their tactics if you let them know where it counts: in the pocketbook.

It's good for a couple of minutes of entertainment, but I'm sure that most slashdotters can figure it out before five minutes. I was confused on how this was supposed to represent 4 dimensions until I saw that the up to down part of the grid represents the 3rd dimension and the left to right part of the grid represents the 4th dimension (time, or what have you) - or vice versa. So I guess it really IS a 4d maze in a very very very limited fashion of the phrase.

Don't bother buying an AMD keychain from OCZ, I'll sell you the one they sold me!

I bought a Duron 600 pretested to do 950 from these guys. At first it seemed to work fine, but within a week it had developed serious stability problems, and eventually refused to boot at all (no POST, not even sync to the monitor). So I contacted customer service. They recommended e-mail, so I tried that first. After a week (I should have waited less time), I picked up the phone. Their only phone contact system is voice mail! You can't call up and talk to a real person, you MUST leave a message and wait to be called back. So it was 3 to 4 weeks after my initial purhcase that I was first meaningfully contacted and offered a small tech tidbit (that should have been on their site in the first place) that helped me out a bit, but in the end was a wash. Even after I had solved my first problem, tracked down another show-stopper and thought I had everything licked, my chip eventually did die.

The end result was a chip they promised to do 950 lasted less than 2 months, most of that time running at its stock 600. And unfortunately for me, as I was re-applying thermal compound and re-mounting the heatsink in a (vain) effort to revive my dead chip (I was grasping at straws at this point), I cracked a corner of the die, thus making the damned thing completely un-returnable.

So I have a $110 AMD-brand keychain-to-be of my own sitting right here on the desk.

Moral of the story? %$#@ those &*@#$es at OCZ! I bought a replacement Duron 600 for $50 and did the unlock job myself with a pencil and am running fine at 900 right now. You're better off doing it yourself than spending extra money and writing off any chance of getting service should they sell you crap akin to what I got.

Hell, I *remember* analog video disks! RCA had a system in the late '70s early '80s that was actually fairly popular until the VCR killed it.
It played video disks with a needle, not too different from that of a turntable.